Case Study: Cinequest's Maverick Approach to Streaming

In a technology-driven industry like streaming media, the blow-by-blow commentary on whose codec saves the most bandwidth or offers the best video quality can overshadow the stories of early adopters actually putting into use what’s available here and now. This is the story of one such early adopter: The Cinequest Film Festival.

Filmmaker Halfdan Hussey and engineer Kathleen Powell cofounded Cinequest 14 years ago with a collective of like-minded creative and technical minds. Hussey, who also serves as Cinequest’s executive director, noticed that San Jose didn’t have a film festival of its own, so he set off to create one. The festival has since grown from four days to twelve, and is now one of the ten largest in the world.

But is about more than just screening independent films. Staying on the cutting edge of technology also fits in with the festival’s mantra (and Silicon Valley location), embodied in their annual Maverick awards, which are given to the filmmakers who did the most to push film into new territory. Cinequest’s technological focus has been on the ever-increasing shift of filmmaking from analog to digital. "The digital technologies have reduced the costs of filmmaking in every aspect," says Hussey. This year’s festival, which—as usual—took place in March, included a session on delivering films via the Internet.